Laney has added the LeadTop and DualTop to its Ironheart Foundry series, two compact and super affordable 60-watt guitar amp heads that are designed to cover home, stage and studio.
If it seems as though Laney’s impressive LoudPedal went back upstream and reinvented itself as a pair of amp heads, that’s because it kind of has. Usually we see the amps inspiring their floor-based counterparts but perhaps it is a sign of the pedalboard amp’s success that we are seeing this trend in reverse.
The Iron Heart Foundry (IHF) Dualtop and Leadtop pack a lot of features into their compact frame. While these designs are solid-state they take their tone cues from the Ironheart tube amp. The Dualtop is a two-channel amp, the Leadtop single-channel.
There is an onboard boost, accessible via the bright red dial on the front panel. There are high and low-power operating modes, with the low-power mode allowing you to run the amp at a practice-friendly < 1-watt setting. There is an effects loop too for easy pedalboard integration, a reverb that has been exported from Laney’s Black Country Secret Path reverb pedal…
The icing on the cake – especially for players wanting to record at home or send their signal straight to a sound desk when playing live is that the DualTope has a high-quality IR loaded speaker emulated XLR DI output, with a slider switch allowing you to choose between a 1x12 and 4x12 cab sim.
The smaller LeadTop does not have the switchable IRs, but you can use the Send output from the its effects loop as a line-out, allowing you to take a direct signal from the head.
When you consider that the two-channel DualTop is priced £259, the LeadTop just £159, that’s a lot of amplifier for the money.
Other features shared by both amps include a footswitch input for the boost feature (pedal sold separately), an 8 to 16-ohms loudspeaker output, an aux-in mini-jack and a headphones output for silent practice and monitoring.
The front panels are straightforward but don’t lack for tone-shaping capability. The switchable pre-boost level control is in red. The DualTop has Gain and Volume controls for Channel One, plus a three-way toggle selecting Clean, Symmetrical and Asymmetrical clipping modes.
Channel Two has Lead Gain and Lead Volume dials with a Bright/Flat/Dark toggle switch, while a three-band EQ (Bass, Middle, Treble) and Reverb dial serves both channels.
The LeadTop is as above but with a toggle switch for alternating between Clean and Lead modes, and there’s no reverb on the smaller model. That said, it is tiny – weighing in at a hair over 8lbs.
The Ironheart Foundry DualTop and LeadTop are out now, priced £259 and £159 respectively. There are also matching 1x12 and 2x12 matching speaker cabinets, priced £349 and £479. See Laney Amplification for more details.
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